Mona Lisa - The World's Most Famous Painting

In his Mill Hill Lecture, Professor Donald Sassoon will examine the story of the Mona Lisa. His much praised Mona Lisa: The History of the World’s Most Famous Painting has been published in translation in Italy, Spain, Korea, Brazil, Finland, China, Taiwan, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. In this book Donald Sassoon describes not only the Mona Lisa and its history, but its mythology, and the processes which combined to raise it to its current level of fame.

He examines Leonardo’s innovative techniques; the problems concerning the identity of the sitter; what happened to the painting after it left Italy when Leonardo joined King Francis I’s court in France; the copies made in the seventeenth century; its celebration by nineteenth century intellectuals; its theft and disappearance early in the twentieth century; the surrealists’, other avant-garde artists’ and cartoonists’ uses of it; its appropriation by the advertising industry; and the never-ending flood of new and ‘conclusive’ theories about Mona Lisa’s smile. In 2006 he also published a pictorial history of the Mona Lisa entitled Leonardo and the Mona Lisa, already translated in German, French, Italian, Hungarian and Spanish.

Professor Sassoon is Professor of Comparative European History at Queen Mary University of London.